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It was the start of another shining and spectacular day for Aino Minako.
The birds were singing, the flowers were blooming, and the sun shone brightly through her bedroom window,
prying the idol singer slowly into wakefulness. For the former guardian of love and beauty, life could scarcely get better. Record sales were skyrocketing like airliners into pigeons, her health was at it's most vigorous peak, and her love life...
Well, everything else was more than fabulous! A mere small detail like her years of burning, unrequited feelings for a certain miko who couldn't recognize love if it marched up and started kicking her in the face could be overlooked for that brief moment in time.
Prancing cheerfully out of bed, Minako made her way to the kitchen for her daily breakfast with Artemis, her stalwart companion and mentor. However, as soon as she had entered the dining area, Artemis let out a gargled shriek and tried throwing what seemed to be a unidentified article into the trash can. Minako, being overly curious by nature, gave the small plush cat an inquiring eyebrow.
"Good morning, Artemis," she greeted the cat suspiciously. "I don't suppose you'd mind sharing the nature of that freakish outburst with me?"
The cat suppressed at twitch. "I didn't mean to startle you," he warbled, "I just had left a mess on the table from earlier and I didn't want to make the maid suspicious so I tried cleaning as fast as I could but really I wasn't up to anything just now."
Minako simply gazed at him coolly, perhaps debating on whether or not four separate sentences had just been brutally mutilated into a single, horrible mutant offspring.
"I see," she muttered, wandering over toward the trash receptacle and gazing inside. Ignoring a squeak from her fuzzy, white companion, she plucked out what seemed to be the usual celebrity gossip magazine.
"Doesn't seem very extraordinary to me, Artemis," she said, watching the frazzled cat. "Though, I could think of much better ways to spend my time."
Artemis smiled nervously. "See? There's really nothing suspicious at all!"
Pursing her lips, she gazed again at the magazine. Idly flipping the cover over, she was greeted with an enormous and brutally neon headline puking over almost an entire page.
Staring closely at the blazing pink letters burning their way into her retinas, the words seemed almost indecipherable. With each individual word configured in her denial ridden mind, somewhere, deep down inside the bowels Minako's brain, her inner being began to enter into a major epileptic seizure.
"MINAKO-CHAN HIDDEN LOVE-SLAVE UNCOVERED?" Read the headline, which under normal circumstances would've been bombastic by itself.
However, underneath the title a dwarfed image of a seemingly random photographer being drop-kicked in the chest by Hino Rei made Minako practically rip the magazine in half.
